The Water Is Wide: Recycling a melody
The Water Is Wide is a beautiful, traditional song. How traditional? It's out of copyright so I can post it here:
X:577
T:The water is wide
C:anon.
O:Scotland
Z:Transcribed by Frank Nordberg - http://www.musicaviva.com
F:http://abc.musicaviva.com/tunes/scotland/the-water-is-wide.abc
M:C
L:1/8
K:F
z A (3GFG|"F"A4-"Bb"AG (3FFD|"F"C4 z2 FE|
w:The wat-er is wide,_ I can-not get o'er, Neith-er
"Dm"F4-FG A(B/A/)|"Gm"G4-"C"GG AB|"Am"c4-cB/A/ G<F|
w:have_ I wings to_ fly._ Give me a boat_ that can car-ry
"Bb"A4-AG FD|"C7"C4-CC (3DFG|"F Bb"F8-|"F"F4|]
w:two,_ and both shall cross,_ my true love and I.
W:
W:The water is wide, I cannot get o'er,
W:Neither have I wings to fly.
W:Give me a boat that can carry two,
W:and both shall cross, my true love and I.
W:
W:I leaned back against an oak,
W:Thinking it was a mighty tree,
W:But first it bent and then it broke,
W:So did my love prove false to me.
W:
W:I put my hand on some soft bush,
W:Thinking the sweetest flower to find,
W:I pricked my finger to the bone,
W:And left the sweetest flower behind.
W:
W:Oh, love is handsome and love is kind,
W:Gay as a jewel when it's new,
W:But love grows old and waxes cold,
W:And fades away like morning dew.
W:
W:The water is wide...
Can't read it? It's in ABCnotation, a cool text based system for writing melodies that produces sheet music when you put it in an ABC converter like this one. So the output ends up like:
Click to embiggen!
You may be pleased to learn that the Newton Family Singers will not be singing "I put my hand on some soft bush" in front of our friends and neighbors. In fact, this song is very old and there are many variations of lyrics that have been sung to this melody.
The melody itself seems borrowed from "Jamie Douglas" a ballad of unhappy love that is often identified as Child Ballad 204; one of 305 English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child and published between 1882 and 1892. Child was a brilliant Bostonian and the first person given the title Professor of English by Harvard University; in seeking to preserve poetry from Great Britain, he became the Alan Lomax of sheet music.
Here's "Jamie Douglas":
